The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle

From Booklist
The Battle of Gettysburg figures as the central point of the Civil War, when the Confederate forces attacked that town in Pennsylvania. Some 170,000 soldiers were involved in the three-day battle, thought to be both the bloodiest battle and the turning point of the war. Creighton, a history professor, offers a view broader of this crucial battle than the typical view that features only prominent white men. She includes the contributions of immigrants, women, and African Americans. Creighton focuses on Union soldiers of German descent who were antislavery, providing a moral perspective that contrasts sharply with Irish-led draft riots. For African Americans living in Pennsylvania, this battle was about the shifting Mason-Dixon line, where freedmen were at risk for being placed into slavery. Women were primarily involved in the recovery period after the battle. Creighton does not seek to replace the historic narrative but rather to expand it to include the diversity of the American character. In so doing, she enriches the history and our knowledge of the deeply ingrained diversity of our nation. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Gettysburg as seen from the viewpoint of three unsung groups--immigrants, women, and African Americans--transforming our understanding of the most important battle in American history. Gettysburg has been written about and studied in great detail over the last 140 years, but there are still many participants whose experiences have been overlooked. In augmenting this incomplete history, Margaret Creighton presents a new look at the decisive battle through the eyes of Gettysburg's women, immigrant soldiers, and African Americans. An academic with a superb flair for storytelling, Creighton draws on memoirs, letters, diaries, and newspapers to get to the hearts of her subjects. Mag Palm, a free black woman living with her family outside of town on Cemetery Ridge, was understandably threatened by the arrival of Lee's Confederate Army; slavers had tried to capture her three years before. Carl Schurz, a political exile who had fled Germany after the failed 1848 revolution, brought a deeply held fervor for abolitionism to the Union Army. Sadie Bushman, a nine-year-old cabinetmaker's daughter, was commandeered by a Union doctor to assist at a field hospital. In telling the stories of these and a dozen other participants, Margaret Creighton has written a stunningly fluid work of original history--a narrative that is sure to redefine the Civil War's most essential battle.


About the Author
Margaret Creighton is an associate professor of history at Bates College. The author of Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling and co-editor of Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, she lives in Yarmouth, Maine.


Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

The Battle of Gettysburg, historian Edward Lilenthal once wrote, is "the symbolic center of American history." If so, rejoins Creighton (History/Bates College), then the center needs to be expanded to embrace other actors apart from the warriors of July 1863. Before Abraham Lincoln took the stage to deliver the Gettysburg Address in the fall of that year, a politician named Edward Everett orated for a full two hours about the gallantry of the Union soldiers who had died. But he also took pains to speak of civilians, particularly the women and free people of color of the town who had cared for the wounded, fed the soldiers, and buried the dead during the fight. Creighton expands on Everett's words, reconstructing the lives of many such figures. One is Abraham Brian, an African American whose 12-acre farm below Cemetery Ridge saw fierce fighting throughout the three-day battle; he escaped, but Confederates took dozens of Gettysburg's blacks into captivity and marched them south into slavery. (Creighton adds that one nameless African-American, a member of a Pennsylvania militia unit, was the third Union soldier to die in the battle.) Then there's Harriet Bayly, a Gettysburg woman who fed Confederates until the food gave out; when Bayly and her family slaughtered every chicken in their yard, Creighton writes, "they did so not only because they felt they had to, but because they hoped to encourage desertion from the Confederate ranks and to silence as many guns as possible." Still another of the forgotten or obscure figures Creighton resurrects is Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who rose to the rank of general; though many such Germans, like Schurz, fought bravely at Gettysburg and otherbattles, they collectively were thought of as cowards, and only in the early 20th century did "immigrant and native-born soldiers [begin] to stand side by side in monuments at the military park." Creighton draws on an impressive range of contemporary documents to tell their many stories: altogether, a lively work of Civil War scholarship. Author tour. Agent: Kathy Anderson/Anderson Grinberg


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices